Any Given Sunday

The weekend's biggest upset goes under the Football Outsiders lens.

Any Given Sunday: Redskins Over Giants

by Andrew Healy

An awful performance in late November that deals a big hit to the loser's playoff chances? For any team but the New York Giants, that would lead to gnashing of teeth and gnawing of fingernails. Eli Manning throws three interceptions (and makes an impressive effort to add a couple more) against the No. 26 pass defense by DVOA? Right tackle Marshall Newhouse gets turnstiled repeatedly by the No. 23 line by adjusted sack rate? Safety Brandon Meriweather lets DeSean Jackson get 5 yards behind him for a 63-yard touchdown? Sounds concerning, but then you remember that this is the boom year in the four-year Super Bowl cycle, so the Giants are supposed to look like they don’t belong before somehow squeezing into the playoffs and then beating the Patriots to win it all.

Well, this week the Giants certainly did look like they don't belong. Sunday night, the Patriots suffered a fumble luck-driven six-point loss in overtime that didn’t tell us much about their championship chances. (That game is now covered in depth in Clutch Encounters.) But earlier in the day, the Giants’ 20-14 loss showed as many warning signs as a six-point loss could. The 20-0 lead that Washington held into the fourth quarter came from a hail of Eli Manning mistakes that suggest his closest counterpart in the NFL today might well be the frequently turnover-prone quarterback he went up against on Sunday.

While no single game should change the perception of Eli Manning at this point, Sunday’s game was a reminder that a turnover machine still lurks in that No. 10 jersey, even if it generally remains caged. Manning’s three interceptions didn’t even include some of his worst throws. Take this doozy:

Sunday’s careless Manning (in fairness, these throws did come in a game situation where risk-taking made sense) has appeared much less frequently in the last couple of years than in 2013, when he led the league with 27 interceptions. Sunday was just Manning’s second three-interception game in the last two seasons, after five such games in 2013. But while Manning now throws fewer interceptions, he has not gotten much more efficient in general. Manning throws shorter passes -- after averaging 9.78 air yards on his passes in 2013, that number dropped almost two full yards to 7.88 yards this season -- and takes fewer chances, but he has been almost exactly a league-average quarterback over the last two years.